My caravan was like a café and it [had] nice light because the windows were on both sides. It was a good place to photograph.” —Chris Killip When I figured this out I decided to drop the Berger/Grant text and just rely on the historical facts.

Twenty eight years later, In Flagrante is getting its first reprint, courtesy of Steidl. In Flagrante Two, which got its name after Killip made the decision to add two photographs to the original sequence, is, in many ways, a different book – one benefits from three decades of hindsight, says Killip.

Chris Killip photographed in the north of England during the 1970s and 80s, when the country’s three main heavy industries—steelworks, shipyards, and coal mines—went into decline. Killip calls the resulting book, In Flagrante, a “portrait of working class struggles at that time.”

Since its publication in 1988, Chris Killip’s In Flagrante has been hailed as a masterpiece of photojournalism – a book that not only influenced many of Killip’s contemporaries but also came to be defined, wrongly, says the photographer, as a savage criticism of Margaret Thatcher’s years as U.K.’s Prime Minister. It’s very disconcerting because it’s like ‘Did this happen?’” he adds. “If you went there you would have no clue that this is where all this happened. But then I have the evidence. It’s kind of fascinating.” We’re discussing his work in England’sNorth East from 1973-1985, images from which made up his seminal photobook In Flagrante. Released in 1988 and showing communities reeling from the effects of de-industrialisation, it was immediately hailed as a classic – and read as a statement against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister most identified with the process of de-industrialisation. In fact Killip has long been at pains to reject that reading, pointing out in In Flagrante Two, published in 2016, that he actually shot his images under four Prime Ministers, “Edward Heath, Conservative (1970-1974), Harold Wilson, Labour (1974-1976), James Callaghan, Labour (1976-1979), Margaret Thatcher, Conservative (1979-1990)”. He moved to the US in 1991, having been offered a visiting lectureship at Harvard, where he was later appointed professor emeritus in the department of visual and environmental studies, a post he held until his retirement in 2017. In the summer of 1991, he was also invited to the Aran Islands to host a workshop and returned to the west of Ireland a few years later to begin making a body of colour work that would be published in 2009 in a book called Here Comes Everybody, its title borrowed from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The zine format appealed to Killip on a few of levels. Firstly, it made the work accessible and affordable. Secondly, zies were an integral part of punk culture. Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, he was able to give out free copies in Skinnigrove, getting opeople there involved in the distribution – people he still knew after so long.He is survived by Mary, his son, Matthew, from a previous relationship with the Czech photographer Markéta Luskačová, his stepson, Joshua, two granddaughters, Millie and Celia, and a brother, Dermott. You know, Chris photographed my wedding,” says Sue Jaye Johnson, a journalist and filmmaker who was one of Chris Killip’s first students at Harvard University in 1991, and later on a friend. “I just asked him and he said yes. And then the whole experience was so surreal. He used a point-and-shoot, and he shot and shot and shot. And at the end of the day, he gave me a plastic bag filled with 20 rolls of film and said, ‘Here’s your gift.’ I am the photographer of the de-industrial revolution in England. I didn’t set out to be this. It’s what happened during the time I was photographing.” —Chris Killip The following year Arbeit/Work was published to coincide with a major retrospective of his work at Museum Folkwang, Essen. It was an honour not granted to him in his lifetime in Britain. The week before his death, he was awarded the Dr Erich Salomon lifetime achievement award for his services to the medium.

In 1971, Lee Witkin, a New York gallery owner, commissioned a limited edition portfolio of Killip’s Isle of Man photographs. The advance allowed him to continue working independently and, in 1974, he was commissioned to photograph Huddersfield and Bury St Edmunds, which resulted in an exhibition, Two Views, Two Cities, held at the art galleries of each city. The following year he was given a two-year fellowship by Northern Arts to photograph the north-east. He worked in Tyneside for the next 15 years, living in a flat in Bill Quay, Gateshead, and steadily creating the body of work that would define him as a documentary photographer. Chris Killip‘s In Flagrante Two is published by Steidl. The corresponding show at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York runs until Feb. 27, 2016.I worked on a dummy of the book during 2014, figuring out the image size and I also thought about the original texts. I still liked the John Berger and Sylvia Grant text that introduced the book in the way that its an oblique commentary, but I didn’t want to use the William Butler Yeats poem or my short text. It was a good moment when I decided to start with the Len Tabner painting image as it was a good substitute for the Yeats text as I felt in reality that he was painting his dreams with the addition of all those seagulls in this drama when in fact it was far to windy for them to fly. The image was also a very good comment on photography and its very distinct relationship with reality. Chris Killip is widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers of his generation. Born in the Isle of Man in 1946, he began his career as a commercial photographer before turning to his own work in the late 1960s. His book, In Flagrante, a collection of photographs made in the North East of England during the 1970s and early 1980s, is now recognized as a landmark work of documentary photography. Other bodies of work include the series Isle of Man, Seacoal, Skinningrove and Pirelli. The people I like very much and I’m very close to, sometimes I don’t get a picture that I think does them justice because I know so much about them In Flagrante means ‘caught in the act,’ and that’s what my pictures are. You can see me in the shadow, but I’m trying to undermine your confidence in what you’re seeing, to remind people that photographs are a construction, a fabrication. They were made by somebody. They are not to be trusted. It’s as simple as that.” —Chris Killip Perhaps Killip acquired his sense of community because he grew up on a small island; perhaps it’s to do with growing up in a pub, run by his parents. Either way, his ability to get on with people shaped both his work and his life. Early on he worked as a beach photographer, a job drawing on the Isle of Man’s appeal as a tourist destination, but also requiring some charm.

You’re going to get a picture by being there. It’s never easy. Sometimes you’re good and they’re good…I’d never seen them before and I never saw them again.” —Chris Killip

1946–2020

Chris Killip, who has died aged 74 from lung cancer, was one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers. His most compelling work was made in the north-east of England in the late 1970s and early 80s and was rooted in the relationship of people to the places that made – and often unmade – them as the traditional jobs they relied on disappeared. In 1988 he published In Flagrante, a landmark of social documentary that has influenced generations of younger photographers. His friend and fellow photographer Martin Parr described it as “the best book about Britain since the war”. Chris didn’t value hierarchy, or wealth, or that particular kind of intelligence,” explains Johnson. “The things he valued were just, ‘Are you meeting me in this moment? Are we sharing ourselves with each other?’”